In This Rain (24 page)

“Hi, A-Dogg. I’ll take tea and a slice of that red velvet cake.”

Armand nodded guardedly. “You gonna eat it here, or take it with you?” His hand hovered between a pile of paper plates and a stack of plastic containers.

“Here. And make the tea a large. And I’d appreciate it, you gave me five minutes.”

“What? Aw, no, I could see that coming. Look, man, I ain’t in no shit! And anyway, I already had my break.”

“I believe you’re clean, I’m not here to lecture you. I need your help. Straight up, A-Dogg.”

“Whatever shit this is, I wanna stay out of it.”

“Five minutes, upstairs, in the back. None of your boys’ll see us. They’d never come up there, it’s full of church ladies.” He moved down the counter. “Vera?”

The day manager, a thin, quick woman with slanted eyes, looked up from the eight-inch-high coconut cake she was slicing. She smiled. “Well, Ford. You needing a fix of shoofly pie?”

“Red velvet cake, my serious weakness. Vera, I need to talk to Armand for five minutes. He’s not in any sort of trouble, I just have to ask him something.”

Vera met Ford’s eyes, then glanced around the shop and nodded. “Grace be back off her break soon. When she come, you go ahead and take five, Armand.”

“I already had my break, Miss Vera.”

“So you saying you don’t want another one? I ain’t never seen you turn down no chance to sit. Grace come back, you go sit with Mr. Corrington. What’s that?” she asked sharply, but whatever Armand had muttered under his breath, neither she nor Ford was going to hear it, because the boy just shook his head and ran his knife through the white-iced crimson mound of a red velvet cake.

It wasn’t five more minutes, Ford working his way through what must have been a half pound of pastry, before Armand appeared, still in his white counter apron. The boy looked quickly around and slipped into the seat across from Ford. He kept his eyes on the staircase.

“What you want?” he asked sullenly. “I told you, I ain’t in no shit.”

“That crew you run with, that could change any minute.”

“That your problem? I ain’t a kid no more.”

“No, you’re not. A-Dogg, listen: you want out of that life, you come to me any time. And that’s all I’m going to say about that because it’s not why I’m here.”

“Yeah, great. So why you here? What you want?”

“What’s the word on who killed Kong?”

“Kong? How I’m supposed to know that shit?”

“He was a friend of yours.”

“Yeah, so?”

“There must be talk.”

“I ain’t heard it.”

“You don’t know who Carlo’s going after?”

“Carlo be going after any motherfucker he think it might be killed his brother. But I ain’t heard nothing, who that is.”

Ford nodded, took up a forkful of cake. Rich, heavy, spicy, Wimp’s red velvet cake had always suggested to Ford what geraniums ought to taste like, but probably didn’t. He didn’t know; unlike the DOI cop and her mud pies, he’d never tried geraniums.

“That it?” Armand asked. “Can I go?”

“What? No, there’s more.” Ford drove mud pies from his mind and washed the cake down with tea. “Kong was into something. With T. D. Tilden, who died Sunday, too. Heard about T.D.?”

“Yeah.”

“You knew him, right?”

“Guess so.”

“Friend of yours?”

“Naw.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Him and me, we don’t have nothing in common. You know, game recognize game? Don’t nobody recognize T.D.”

“He claimed to be a player.”

“He wish. His mouth always writing checks his body can’t cash.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nigger always bragging on himself, gonna do this, gonna be that. He baaaad. Yeah, right. Ain’t but talk. He gonna be a engineer, build bridges and shit. Learning how to make drawings. Last week he come waving ’em up in everybody’s face. Tryin’ to get us to think he all that.”

Ford put his tea down. “What drawings, A-Dogg?”

“Wasn’t but bullshit! You know, like blueprints? But dig, that shit, they ain’t just pictures. They got words, tell you what the parts mean. What they made out of, what to do with ’em. Ain’t no way T.D. made the ones he showed us.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause of the words! Nigger can’t read, know what I’m saying? Gonna be a fucking engineer.” Armand snorted. “Damn, dawg, he drop outta school.”

“You dropped out yourself, A-Dogg.”

“I ain’t planning no three-piece-suit career! And you said you wasn’t gonna lecture me, yo.”

“Sorry.” Ford scraped up the last of the vanilla frosting. “Wonder if I could get a job here myself?”

“See if I can set it up for you.”

“Thanks.” Ford nodded gravely. “Okay, you didn’t like T.D. But someone murdered him and I’d like to know who it was.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Somebody done him? I thought he fell.”

“I don’t think so. And I think it had to do with whatever T.D. was into with Kong. Could be the same person did them both. You know anything about it?”

“Naw.”

“Nothing at all? Hanging with that crew?”

“Kong don’t hang. Always got something going on. And plus, him and Blowfish don’t get on.”

“Okay, but it was Kong brought you into that crew. You were his homey. He never told you anything, about T.D., what he had going? Never mentioned him?”

Armand shifted in his seat, scratched the back of his head. “Kong be talking some shit. Not about T.D. Don’t know nothing about that. But.”

“What is it?”

Armand hesitated, glancing at the stairs. No one was moving up or down. He looked back at Ford. “Kong, he come around couple days ago, have some flash new bling. Look like Jacob the Jeweler, but Carlo, he say Kong ain’t got that kind of paper, thing must be a fake. Kong say, yeah, okay, ain’t no Jacob the Jeweler, he yesterday’s news. This the real deal, though, platinum and ice, come from a guy so hot he next week’s news. Levi something. You know, like the pants? Kong say, when you working for white bread, you be raking it in, so you could go ahead and get your bling from a Jew. Why they call it ‘jewelry,’ he say. He musta thought he saying something really funny, because he say it like a hunnert more times. Reason I remember, because he keep saying it. ‘Taking so much off white bread, buy my jewelry from a Jew.’ Then his phone ring, and he check it out, say, ‘Yo, this him, I gotta go get paid.’ Next thing

” A-Dogg shrugged. “Ain’t no next thing, far as Kong go.”

“White bread. You know who?”

“Ain’t never said.”

“And Kong didn’t say anything about T.D.?”

“Naw. I didn’t even know they was tight.” Armand looked down over the railing again. The line at the counter stretched to the door. “Look, Mr. Corrington, I better get back. Miss Vera, she be pissed off, I hang around up here too long. They got customers.”

“Okay, Armand, I appreciate the help. Now go on. Don’t want Miss Vera to fire you, screw up your probation.”

“Shit, that was up three months ago.” Armand stood.

“It was? Why are you still working here?”

“I like it. Miss Vera, she teaching me to bake. That red velvet cake?” He pointed to Ford’s empty plate. “I made it.”

Ford, watching the boy trot down the stairs, asked himself if wonders would, in fact, ever cease.

Sutton Place

Ann retrieved the DOI Cavalier from the State Office Building garage and sat in traffic on 125th Street, trying to decide where exactly to go.

She was fighting her first choice: Walter Glybenhall’s midtown building. She’d leave the car double-parked, storm up to his office. Eyes blazing, she’d demand he admit causing the accidents at Mott Haven in a nasty scheme to secure for himself a fabulously valuable city-owned Harlem site. She could see the color drain from Walter’s face, hear him gasp and then, breaking down, admit all, sobbing. She’d raise a merciless Ice Queen eyebrow and call Perez, who’d haul a broken shell of the once-arrogant bastard off to rot in prison for the rest of his life.

She inched another block. Three kids in the too-large baseball caps that were this year’s fashion gave her predatory stares as they crossed in front of her. One tapped her hood and cocked a finger-gun, showing a malevolent smile. She gave him a second to think how clever he was, then she smacked the Cavalier’s powerful cop-car horn and almost blasted his ass into the next block. Screeching the car into action as the light changed, she peeled hard out past a bus and down the avenue, leaving the kids standing in the crosswalk screaming curses.

She was six blocks on before she managed to wrestle the car east again. If any of her arresting-Walter fantasy after the storming-in part had a snowball’s chance, she’d do it. But the real truth was, Walter would laugh. He’d pat her head, metaphorically or maybe even physically, though he should know better than to touch her or she’d have him up on assault. With a pitying smile he’d point out that she had nothing except an active imagination. And he’d throw her out.

She turned the car onto the FDR and drove south, toward the office. She had nothing. But there had to be something. And whatever it was, she was going to find it.

Sparkling water, the white wake of a fast tug, the soaring arcs of bridges on her left; on her right, skyscrapers, car-clogged streets, and huge fenced holes where more skyscrapers were coming. As the road rose she could see, over one of the fences, men standing in mud fifty feet below. Yellow vehicles with massive tires crawled, coming and going on unfathomable errands. Unfathomable to her. Joe would understand. Joe would be able to explain all this equipment, all this activity. If she could call him now— if he weren’t standing in the wake of some huge yellow rig himself, spreading asphalt on a dusty road— and describe the dance she was watching, he’d tell her what it meant. She could hear his patient voice theorizing, extrapolating from what she was seeing to what end result the architect must want that required this hole dug or that connection made now, a dozen steps back.

What end result the architect must want.

The architect.

Ann slapped the gumball on top of the car and switched the siren on.

*

Dumping her bag and coat on her desk, Ann slid into her chair and flicked the computer on. With impatient clicks she dug into the Times archives. She needed the piece on the city’s plan for the Harlem site, the one Westermann had said ran months ago. She found it in a Sunday real estate section, three cheerleading paragraphs and two illustrations. One was a photo of an architect’s model: gleaming wood, tiny metal people, and wire trees, shot from above. Next to it, a drawing: neon, jazz clubs, couples strolling night sidewalks. She scanned the article, didn’t find the architect’s name. Nor was it credited on the model or the rendering. Could this be a first, a self-effacing architect? She called the Times reporter and got no satisfaction: the photos had come from the press liaison in the mayor’s office who’d sent out the release. The reporter had no idea who’d done the design work.

“You didn’t ask? You weren’t curious? A project this big?”

“Half the press packets I get are for projects that’ll never get built. I don’t have time to waste running them down. This one on Block A went right into my pie-in-the-sky file.”

“Then why publish it?”

“To keep the conversation going.”

Newspaperese, Ann assumed, for Why piss off the mayor if you don’t have to?

Ann took the mayor’s press liaison’s name, thinking therein lay nothing. Staring at her monitor, she let her eyes wander from model to rendering. The model was too abstract to interest her, but she found herself getting absorbed in the picture. Her skin felt the sharp, exciting chill of an autumn night. She smelled fallen leaves, heard laughter and the soft wail of music floating from an open door. But as the music grew, a new sound rose over it: Joe’s voice.

Not the picture.

It was what he used to say, when she’d ask him how he did it, read the photos and drawings, made them give up their secrets in a way she never could.

Not the picture. The pattern.

She grabbed the phone and called the Times reporter back. “Who took the photo?”

“Of the Harlem model?”

“Right. Can you check?”

“Don’t have to. I remember, from the look of it. It’s a Katherine Katz.”

Ann Googled Katherine Katz and found her website. An architectural photographer, specializing in models, furniture, buildings, and interiors. Color or black-and-white, film or digital, large format or small. Well, that covered the waterfront. She scrolled through the sample photos. There were even three of the waterfront. The rest were rooms, chairs, intricate cabinetry. Many were sensuous close-ups: smooth curves, sharp edges, breathtakingly precise joinery, lit in a way so lush, so ambiguous, that they looked alive.

And then there were the straight-ahead architecture shots: buildings, and models of buildings. Though the buildings were the work of many different designers, the photographs had a family resemblance, the same unsettling living-thing quality of the close-up details.

And because a photographer’s website is a selling tool and Katherine Katz clearly wanted visitors to know the A-list nature of her clients, each architect’s name stood boldly beneath the photo of her, or his, building.

And her, or in this case his, model.

*

Another thing she’d learned from Joe: You don’t call.

As a prosecutor her training was formality. Make appointments, give notice. A prosecutor, in court, was actually forbidden to surprise. Ann had become extremely good at it, the formality business, the way serious foreign-language students can learn to out-talk native speakers.

Then she’d come to DOI. “The less they know about what you’re up to, the less likely it is they’ll hide what they’re up to,” Joe had told her. “You seem to have a natural talent for throwing people off balance. Use it!”

She pulled the Cavalier into a midtown No Standing zone and stuck the Official Business card on the dashboard. This red granite building stood not three blocks from Walter Glybenhall’s office. Probably one of Walter’s criteria for choosing an architect, that he wouldn’t have to travel far to go see him. Or, come to think of it, maybe not. Walter no doubt made his architect, like everyone else, come to him.